Quinoa dinner skillet | vegan meal prep

We made this quinoa dinner skillet for our mom two weeks ago when she was expecting nothing but chicken thighs. Surprise! Find out how to make this simple vegan meal prep recipe and read about our mom’s reaction below.

Spoiler alert: she loved it.

Okay, you can go straight to the recipe now. Oh, btw this recipe makes A LOT, so it’s gonna be a good choice for meal prep, just FIY.

Last month we decided to spend some time at our mom’s place. She’s been having a tough year – health issues, business issues, personal issues – everything going the wrong way from the start.

So we thought we'd spend some time there and make life easier for her by cooking dinner and watching over her diet a little bit. She always comes home from work STARVING and ends up eating whatever she has in the fridge, so we wanted to make something healthy for her.

That day she instructed us that she wants the chicken thighs in her fridge for dinner. Don’t we dare do anything else.

Well, we were going to make this recipe with chicken thighs at first, but then we discovered that the ones our mom had bought were bad. And we mean almost got a salmonella poisoning from looking at them bad.

Now. Our mom has been struggling for years with overweight, high blood pressure, high cholesterol – you know just the usual. Therefore we've been trying to make her eat more plant-based dishes for a while now and she’s been resisting as if we're serving her hair instead of food.

But once we smelled the rotting chicken thighs it pissed us off. Chicken thighs for dinner, our ass. We pulled myself together, grabbed the opportunity and some vegetables from the local store and here we are. We’re eating a healthy vegan dinner today. And we'll use the quinoa you bought last year, deal with it mom.

So we made this, cooking took us around 30-40 minutes, more time for us, because we were taking the pictures. The cool thing is that this makes a lot and you can even skip a step or two. This quinoa recipe is solid for a weekly meal prep, because it makes so much – you’ll eat for 3-4 days.

When our mom came back home for dinner:

“Ugh, we’re eating quinoa, pronounced keen-wah?”

“Yeah, the chicken thighs were disgusting.”

“Fine.”

Tries it and mumbles:

“It’s good”.

We didn’t quite keep it plant-based because we made a garlic yogurt sauce with it, but it was a huge step for our mom. To keep it plant based – keep it like this or serve with your favorite vegan garlic sauce, something like this avocado dill dip or our vegan tzatziki will work.

If you’re struggling with helping someone eat more plant-based dishes – start with this recipe.

Step 1.

Prep your ingredients. Rinse and drain chickpeas, wash your quinoa, clean and chop your vegetables. We used need onions, green beans, green bell peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, parsley, but you can use any vegetables you want. You can use fresh or frozen green beans, we usually prefer frozen, since they’re all cleaned and chopped, but here we used fresh ones. We cut off the ends and chop them smaller.

*You see a mushroom in the picture above, but we decided not to use it at the last moment. Feel free to use.

Step 2

Using a large cooking pan with a lid, saute onions with olive oil and spices for 1-2 minutes.

Then add the tomatoes and cook for 2-3 minutes – they’ll make the tomato sauce for you.

Step 3

Add green beans and then quinoa. Close with the lid and cook like this for 5 minutes.

Then add the chickpeas and cook for another 5-7 minutes until quinoa looks cooked.

Step 4

Time to add your veggies: first eggplant, cook for 2-3 minutes.

Then add the green bell peppers and the garlic. Take off heat and pour some olive oil on top.

Step 5

The recipe is ready like this, but we like our green peppers and eggplant baked, so we transferred everything into a baking tray and baked for 5-10 minutes at 350F/180C.

Take out the oven and stir in some chopped parsley in there.

Step 6

Serve with your favorite garlic sauce and enjoy. We went for a simple yogurt garlic sauce, but this avocado dill sauce or our vegan tzatziki would be great plant-based options.

This turned out to be a satisfying, filling and satisfying quinoa dinner recipe without any meat in it and as we mentioned, because this makes a lot it will be a good vegan meal prep recipe.